NASA Women's History Month STEM Event

In partnership with the White House Council on Women and Girls, NASA will host a Women’s History Month event Wednesday, March 16 that examines the role of women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), featuring some of NASA’s top leaders – women in STEM. The event at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website starting at noon EDT.

The program will begin with remarks from the Associate Director for Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Jo Handelsman. This will be followed by a panel discussion with NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman, Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan, Deputy Associate Administrator Lesa Roe, and Johnson Space Center Director and former astronaut Ellen Ochoa. Goddard’s Deputy Director for Technology and Research Investments, Christyl Johnson, will serve as the moderator.

Newman joined the agency in May 2015. Prior to her tenure with NASA, Newman was the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Her expertise is in multidisciplinary research that encompasses aerospace biomedical engineering.

Roe started her career with NASA in 1987 at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as a radio frequency communications engineer in the Space Shuttle Engineering Directorate. She later served in the International Space Station Payloads Office at Johnson before transitioning to NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, where she served as center director from October 2005 to April 2014.

Stofan was appointed NASA chief scientist in August 2013, serving as principal advisor to the agency administrator on science programs and science-related strategic planning and investments. Her appointment as chief scientist marked a return to NASA. From 1991 through 2000, she held a number of senior scientist positions at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, including chief scientist for NASA's New Millennium Program and deputy project scientist for the Magellan Mission to Venus.

Ochoa began her NASA career at Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, where she managed the Intelligent Systems Technology Branch before being selected as an astronaut in 1990. A veteran of four spaceflights, she has logged more than 978 hours in space. Ochoa became director of Johnson in 2012.